


He Sees the Ghosts

by cathedraltunes



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bill Dies, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Survivor Guilt, The Power Of Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-25 15:27:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22498309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cathedraltunes/pseuds/cathedraltunes
Summary: Bill loved them, like he'd loved Georgie. That was why he had to do it.
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Bill Denbrough & Georgie Denbrough, Bill Denbrough & The Losers Club, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 28
Kudos: 137





	He Sees the Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: some gore. Pennywise uses some homophobic ideas tunneled through Eddie's childhood hypochondria.
> 
> Mood music: [_...And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness_ by Ólafur Arnalds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVNArV9UfYI).
> 
> I haven't written anything in ages and ages but here we go.

**2016.**

Bill thought nonsensically, _his blood pooled silver beneath them, in the dim moonlight_ : a line he'd written in Silver & Gold, the novella Cemetery Dance Publications put out as a chapbook in 2011. The one critic who had read it made a particular effort to mock that line.

There in the sewer, in the hazy streaming darklight of the moon somewhere far distance, Eddie gagged blood. It was ink. He was pale with it sticking to him. "Richie," he said, or _Rrgh-ee_ , and he said this because Richie was screaming, or wailing, his hands black with that hateful ink, his glasses black with it, it was on his lips, and--

(Sharon Denbrough screamed. She said, "No, no, no." She said, "Georgie, Georgie, no," to the police officer in his rain-sodden uniform as he stood in the doorway with his hat held between his hands before his waist. "Not my baby, not Georgie, get out, get out of my house, fuck you!" said Sharon Denbrough. _Don't you ever let me hear you swear, Bill, not ever in this house._ Bill stood on the stair with a hand on the smooth polished banister, a used tissue crushed between his fingers and the rail. He tried to say, "Georgie's just outside, Mom. I made him a boat," but his throat was thick with snot, his tongue an idiot thing, so he just stood there on the stair as useless and as stupid as the policeman. He just stood.)

"We gotta help him," Richie said, "guys, we have to get him out of this, this fucking shithole!"

And Eddie with his inkblood hands touching at Richie's arms, ghosting at his jaw, his ear, the broken lens of his Buddy Holly glasses, he mumbled, "Richie... 's'ok... fuckin' got IT."

And Beverly said, "Richie. We can't break the circle," her red hair matted to her face. Ben held her arm, held her firm. Death in her.

And Pennywise laughed, a ringing cacophony that shook old dirt into the shitwater and moved oily with teeth through Bill's stuttering brain. IT giggled. IT cackled. IT squaled, a dead child with a birthday cake. Hey, Bill, said Georgie, you can have some if you want.

"Poor Eddie," said IT through giggling spurts. Lean and crooked shadows bent outside the green shafts of light. "Aw, Eds, my cute little baby Eds!"

"Don't call him that!" shrieked Richie. "Don't call him that you fucking shit-eating algae-ass bottom-dwelling bitch!"

IT had begun to move forward. At this it shuddered and scuttled away, menacing but lurking too, like a kid outside a circle of friends playing. 

"Richie," Beverly was saying softly to him, "Richie. We have to get up. We have to get up now."

"Richie, it's OK," Eddie was saying too, and Ben covered his eyes even as Richie looked wildly at them all and cursed them too.

Mike didn't look at Eddie or at Richie. He looked at Bill, who looked at the trembling shadows, smaller perhaps than they were before. 

"What is it, Bill?" asked Mike quietly.

Bill said, "Get Eddie up. Get him up. We'll all help. You said we can't break the circle, Beverly, so we _all have to get up_."

  
  


**1989.**

They'd fought at the clubhouse, a play war: Rebels against the Empire, even if no one wanted to play an Imperial. it was unamerican to play an Imperial. Richie said, "Hey, I'll be Darth Vader! I can do the voice, listen." He'd demonstrated. 

"Darth Vader?" said Eddie, his voice going higher. "Darth Vader? You sound like my fucking grandma choking on a, on a kielbasa. You sound like if a bad radio station fucked the broadcast over TV noise!"

"Maybe your grandma choked on my kielbasa, Rebel Scum!"

Mike hadn't seen Star Wars; he wasn't allowed. "It's not." He shrugged. "It's not Christly."

"If it's not Christly," said Stan.

"Oh, hey, you should see Star Wars," said Beverly. "It's pretty cool for some space stuff."

"Pretty cool?" Richie had gone into hysterics. "Star Wars is like, the national anthem."

Bill said, "I think the nat- the national anthem is the national anth, anthem," and Richie threw his hands in the air and turned on Ben, the only one without an opinion, Ben who blinked mildly at him and then said, "I am a Jedi, like my father before me." That settled that. They'd used sticks for lightsabers although Eddie had refused, arguing that the Force meant he didn't have to be hit by anyone, which meant Richie hit him twice and Eddie tackled him into the dirt and stuffed handfuls of dust in his hair as he shouted, "This is spiders! This is spiders and worms and fucking shit beetles from Africa!"

No one noticed Bill coming home coated in dirt, red lines on his arm that would tomorrow turn purple and green, bruises: war trophies. He read some comics for a while at the table, over a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch he forgot to dump in the sink. Then he took a shower, water hot, maybe not as hot as the shower Eddie would have taken "the minute I get home, do you have any idea what my mom is going to do if she sees this hole in my shirt, Richie, she's gonna pop her lid, you dickhead." Bill curled his toes in the water puddling at his feet. He grinned, thinking of Mike asking Ben to explain how Star Wars worked. "Do you mean the Force?" "No, everything. I don't really get it. The Empire's bad, but who's the guy Richie's playing?"

Tipping his face up to the shower head, Bill closed his eyes. He worked it in his throat before he tried, slowly, "L-Luke, I am your... father," and laughed at his own gulpy sounding voice.

From the drain at his feet Georgie cried, "Bill. Bill."

He dropped to his knees. The water matted the hair to his head, dripped from his eyelashes; he was blind. A calm thing in his head said, _It isn't Georgie,_ but Bill said, "Georgie?" and his face ran wet.

"Bill, I'm so cold," Georgie wailed. His voice was so far away. It cracked like it did when Georgie cried. "Bill, I wanna go home."

Bill curled over the drain. He covered his face. "You're not r-real. You're not really Georg-g-g--" The water beat hotly against his back.

"Bill, I'm real. Bill, Bill, he says, he says that if you come down, he'll let me go. He'll let me go back up, Bill. If you come down here instead." He wept all this, for minutes or for hours, as all the blood in Bill beat hot as the shower water, all of that blood in his ears as he tried not to listen but he did. He had to. It was Georgie.

"I c-can't," he said. "I can't, Georgie, I can't, you're not--"

"Bill, please!"

"If you were real," said Bill. "If, if you were, you were, were re-real..."

And somewhere down there, somewhere with Georgie, IT hissed, "Yesss, Bill, if he was real, wouldn't you come? Wouldn't you come save little Georgie? He's all alone down here, Bill. It's not fair, is it, that you get to be so big and strong but Georgie has to stay in the dark with me forever and ever and ever and ever. Why, I bet if you came to play with me, I might could send sweet, tasty Georgie up to that big summer sun..."

He would forget what he said that day to the monster in the drain. He'd forget that day entirely. Even Georgie, the way his voice would crack, Bill forgot that too. 

"F-fuck you!" Bill roared into the drain. "I'm gonna ki-kill you! You leave him alone, you ffff, you ffffff--" and IT laughed like the sound of thunder while Georgie laughed, too, Georgie laughed and said, "Hey, Bill, fuck you!" while Bill sobbed and the water at last began to turn cold.

  
  


**2016.**

Hands, all their hands together, grasping at Eddie, pulling him up even as his head lolled and the hole in his chest gurgled and he screamed at the pain of it. The Losers pulled Eddie to his frail and trembling feet and held him there with them, Richie's hand cupping the back of Eddie's head, holding Eddie's face to his shoulder as Eddie vomited. Bill slung an arm around Eddie's waist. He'd a sudden piercing memory of Eddie, Eddie at the age of nine, dragging on his inhaler and then saying, "Sure, Bill, let's go to the factory."

With something like wonder Bill said to Eddie, "You're my oldest friend," this too small kid in first grade who stuck his chin out and said "hey, leave him alone, it's not his fault he's stupid," when some other kid made fun of Bill's stutter. "You called me Big Bill." Eddie had followed him everywhere, as if Bill were the hero. Bill's eyes stung. Big Bill, _hey, Bill. Hey, Bill! Why're you going so fast! C'mon, wait for me!_ Hey, Bill!

Mike's warm hand spanned the small of Bill's back. They were holding up Eddie, the five of them, Richie curled around him like a shrimp around itself, Ben and Beverly two mud-stained shadows with their heads bent together over his, Mike at his back and Bill at his left; and it was Mike that held Bill up in turn. Mike had held them all up, this whole time. Inside Bill's head a rolodex clicked, Zach Denbrough flipping the notecards around as he looked for a business contact. Each page of Bill's rolodex was a different thought, another memory: here was Eddie looking up at Bill in relief after Bill had shoved the big kids away from him. Here was Stan smiling, the tiny careful folds of skin at his eyes like kisses. Mike returned the neatly hand written short story Bill had wrote and said, "That was pretty good, Bill," and every part of Bill had eased. Richie grabbed the rope swing and said, "Everybody here can suck my dick!" and took it out farther over the quarry water than anyone had ever done before. Ben bent over a graph notebook with a stubby pencil in hand and the hairs at his nape cut short and golden. Beverly. Beverly. And Georgie.

Mike said, "Bill," low and warm and kind but waiting. Waiting for Bill to say. Waiting for Bill to know.

 _I don't know,_ Bill thought. He thought it without words, in a yearning grief. I don't know. I don't think I ever did know. I'm just a kid, Mike, I'm not any different. I can't save you guys. I can't save anyone. Georgie, he went out and I let him, and he never came back, and I remember now, Mike, I remember what IT said, that if I'd give myself up then IT would let Georgie go and maybe IT wouldn't but what if IT did? What if IT did and I let Georgie die again because I wanted to live? 

Bill gasped. He hadn't meant to. But the sob was in his throat. He couldn't bear it.

Eddie's eyes fluttered. He looked at Bill. He mumbled, "Hey, Big Bill. It's OK. It's not your fault."

Mike tightened his hold on Bill. He looked at Bill, too, his eyes dark, his gaze so steady. "Hey, Bill," he said softly from that lonely height.

"Hey, Bill," said Ben. There were rings around his eyes. He smiled, gently.

Beverly held her hand out to him, around Richie's back. She said, "Hey. Bill Denbrough," and he didn't take her hand but she didn't drop it.

Richie's face was blood-stained. Tear-stained. He rested his chin on top of Eddie's head. Somewhere behind those filthied glasses he blinked away more of those tears he shed for Eddie. 

"Hey, Bill," said Richie with his snot-rough voice. No voice. Just Richie. "You fucker."

Brokenly, clinging to Eddie, Bill said, "I love you guys. I-- You're my best friends. I love you. I love you," and it tore him inside to say it, as if he'd built scar tissue all around the love he'd felt for them and now all that tissue was ripping and he was the one ripping it. 

"We love you," said Eddie so faintly, and all the faces around Eddie shone with their love, their love for Eddie and for Bill and for each other; and if Bill didn't blink away the tears so quickly he thought that he saw Georgie, too, Georgie in the corner holding a turtle in his hand and waving at Bill with the other, with the hand he'd lost before he died.

Pennywise screamed. IT screamed. Something unlike language sounded in the dark: a curse, a hatred. 

Georgie in the corner held the turtle to his little chest and said, "I love you, Bill," and Bill held the Losers to him. He held them in his arms. He held all of them, somehow, so deep in his love. He said, "I love you, Georgie."

Beverly looked at Bill. She said, "We have to do it now," and Mike nodded - Bill felt it through his spine - but it was Eddie who lifted his head wearily and looked up into the dark and said, voice trembling but sure,

"Hey, _asshole!_ You smell like you shit yourself!"

Richie laughed hysterically and said, "Yeah, no wonder nobody wants to fuck you!"

IT shrieked ITs rage, a blistering thing that rattled at their bones; but looking at the turtle in Georgie's hands, Bill knew suddenly. He knew. It was as if he had always known; he'd only forgotten for a little while.

Bill told the Losers what they had to do.

  
  


**2014.**

Bill got drunk. He did that on occasion, though never to real excess. Audra could never say he was pissed. She rather enjoyed it those few times he had a bit much, as the drink made her quiet, serious, thinking husband a bit of a sweetheart. Muddled, perhaps, and clingy, but she hardly minded. She would click her tongue and fuss over him, and Bill would look up at her with his pretty eyes all befuddled and let her stroke the thinning hair from his brow or pass a damp washcloth behind his ears. If he was drunk, she could pretend they were madly in love rather than comfortably in love, that they had wed ages ago, years and years ago, that they were in their dotage and this was the sort of thing she did for him every night, even the nights he hadn't a drop.

This occasion he had taken a break from the new novel and had a few fingers of the Bunnahabhain, rarely touched. Alcohol had never been her particular virus. That was Bill's horse to wrangle if he liked. She was in her own office on the telephone with her agent, discussing the role in Bitters, debuting on Broadway the year next, and whether she ought to take it. She had come out after the call intending to talk with Bill about it, to see how he felt about moving out to New York City for the season. There he was on the chesterfield with the whiskey tumbler forgot on the floor and the back of a hand over his eyes. Ah, she thought, the real bitters, and she resolved to tell him her joke in the morning.

As Audra passed the washcloth over his brow she said, "You don't ever drink the fine stuff. Trouble with the book?"

"Fell asleep," he said muzzily. "I dreamed..." His brow furrowed under her hand. She stroked it not with the cloth but her other, bare hand. "I don't remember."

"You ought to get to bed. Need help with the stairs?"

Bill yawned tremendously. His jaw cracked. "Naw. I got it." He slung his legs off the settee and leaned forward as if to stand; then he paused there. He frowned again. 

"What is it?"

"The turtle," he murmured. "Why didn't the turtle help us?"

Audra said laughingly, "You've a turtle in the book?"

Bill looked at her with a squint around his eyes. "A turtle... No. I don't know what I was saying." He yawned again. "You're right. I'm going to head on up. Everything OK with your call?"

"Nothing to report," she said. "We'll chat in the morning. Why don't you go change and I'll come up in a half?"

"Might be asleep," he warned.

Audra pretended to shiver. "Ooo, make the bed nice and cosy. That way I don't have to warm it up myself."

It was Bill's turn to laugh and he did. He never mentioned the turtle again and when she read the third draft of the book, the one he deemed worth her reading, there was no sign of anything turtle or lizard or frog to be seen. Of course, by then, she'd forgotten the whole thing with the turtle, and Bitters had fallen somewhat in importance once Bill's script got the greenlight and the movie went into pre-production. Who could explain why anyone dreamed anything?

  
  


**2016.**

Richie said, "I can't believe we're bullying a fucking alien to death! What a fucking joke! I'm talking about you, Pennywise, you god damn punchline!" and Bill laughed. He couldn't help it. He'd forgotten that, too, how Richie made him laugh, how Richie made them all laugh. 

Pennywise screamed and begged and spat curses at them, as IT writhed in the mud, in the shit, in the wastes of Derry. ITs limbs, many-jointed and many-barbed, crumbled; they shed like dried clay rubbed quickly between a man's hands; the inhuman face grew gaunt and lopsided. Teeth dropped like pebbles, tossed in a well. 

"You're a weak son of a bitch," said Mike: a proclamation of law. "You're a coward. There's nothing to you but ghosts."

"I've got them in me," IT scrowled, "all your ghosts, I ate them, I ate Georgie, _ha ha ha!_ I ate your mama, Mike, I ate your daddy too! _Beverly, you bad girl, I know what you did!_ "

Ben held her hand. She turned her face down to the thing wriggling grotesquely in the sewer water, and her face was cool and even. She said, "Yeah. So what? I'm not afraid of you. I'm not afraid of anything. Not anymore. Maybe I should thank you for that. You showed me how strong I am."

IT wailed. 

In their arms, Eddie shuddered. His skin was pale. The blood was like night. Richie clutched him nearer. Dearer. They all did. Let the dying thing turn itself over and over. 

Then a stillness in the way IT spoke: a silkiness. "But I get you, Eddie," said IT. "You're my Eddie now. My precious sickly Eddie. I can taste you. Scrumptious." Myra's voice filled the chamber: "Eddie, you shouldn't hold boys like that, especially not that nasty Tozier boy. They'll only make you sick, Eddie, they'll fill you up with their dirty germs. Come back to me and I'll take care of you. You're mine forever. _My Eddie._ "

"No," said Eddie. "No."

Bill looked at IT in the water. He saw how its worming back tensed. Those frail, shedding arms sharpened, as if all the clay knocked off had exposed fresh edges. The eyes like a shark's, without whites, and the jaw distending to bite. The rolodex turned. On the last card it said, _He'll let me go, Bill, if you come down instead._

Bill shook off Mike's hand. Mike said, "Bill?" Eddie said, "You're not real," muffled into Richie's shoulder. Bill put out his arms and shoved them all: the Losers, his friends. 

The knife went through him. An arm whittled thin as a needle. The teeth sank into his neck. IT tore the flesh out of his throat. The arterial blood sprayed. He thought it looked almost like silver, almost like gold. Bill said, "No one has ever loved you," and he wrapped his arms around IT and crushed what remained into nothing even as he fell into the water.

How quickly, after that? He heard them shouting. He blinked and there was Mike leaning over him, his beautiful face creased with grief. There was Beverly, crying, and Ben too. And Richie, and Eddie who was touching his own chest with surprise, and there was Georgie behind them. They said, Bill. Bill. Bill. He blinked again, and the world was shaking now, and Beverly was trying to drag him up. Ben was bending an arm under him. Eddie was saying, "I'm not-- I'm not bleeding anymore. Why is Bill still bleeding?" and Bill thought he knew. He couldn't tell them. They were so far away, but he felt them there, their warm hands, their love. He blinked again, slowly, and they were pulling away from him. The world was falling, rocks punching into the water, and they wept as they left him, and he wished they wouldn't cry but he understood. They'd never left him. They never did.

Georgie sat next to Bill. He pulled his little knees up to his chest and laid his cheek on his knees. 

"Because I love them," Bill said. "That's why." He blinked and there were tears in his eyes, tears on his face, as the world fell apart around him. "I had to, Georgie. Because I couldn't for you."

Georgie leaned over his knees. He pressed his small hands on Bill's chest. He laid his head down between his hands and he looked with his sweet eyes at Bill.

"Hey, Bill," said Georgie.

"Hey, Georgie," said Bill.

"I love you."

Bill smiled. He closed his eyes. 

  
  


**somewhere else.**

He floated deep in the ocean, in the black waters where the sun could never go. The water should have chilled him, the atmospheric pressure crushed his ribs into his organs and his organs into small balls of pulp. Instead he floated warm, held gently by soft and ancient currents that had flown (he knew) from a spring outside of the stars, before the worlds, before the first trembling, wet breath had been taken. Bill drifted in and out of awareness, lulled by the faint motion. He was womb-held. He'd a feeling of someone stroking his cheek and singing to him.

Something stirred the water around Bill. He wasn't afraid, then. He felt its passing in the way that the ocean swelled with purpose. Then it passed again, and he opened his eyes as though he had only just remembered he had them; and somehow in the primordial dark he saw the turtle. He saw the turtle.

All of it, he saw, and yet he grasped that it was vast beyond all comprehension, a thing to dwarf the sun and every star. The turtle filled the world; it filled every world. Gracefully, ponderously too, the turtle circled him. The huge flipper brushed a tip along his shoulder and he shuddered to be touched by such a thing. He saw the turtle, and the turtle saw him.

Maturin. Maturin. The turtle spoke to him though not with words and he felt the fullness of the maturin's regard vibrating within him so that he was-- he was nothing, only flesh, a thin organ of skin filled with the turtle's truths. The turtle's truths were these:

I love you. My little one. I have loved you since the moment I vomited out these stars and worlds and trillions of miles of cosmic dust. I have loved you since you were dust. I have loved you when you were of the ooze. 

Nothing had ever loved him like this: vastly, absolutely, impersonally. He was not Bill to the maturin. He was only loved. He could not bear the maturin's love. The hugeness of it pushed him deeper; it made him smaller; he drowned in it.

The turtle said do not be afraid. Nothing dies forever. You are souls and stars and love; you are love. Even IT cannot kill the things that live. A sorrow penetrated the maturin: a pity, for the dead creature that had died further and done so unloved, alone.

"Please," said Bill. "Please. Let me go."

Do not be afraid said the maturin gently from its ageless stars, in its starless sea. They love you still, as I love you. 

He wept, curling about himself in the waters, trying weakly to remember his name, the shape of his self in this obliterating Truth. 

My little one, said the maturin; and he heard his mother say, my Bill, and his father say, howdy there Wild Bill, and he lifted his trembling head. The turtle slowly pirouetted on its side, and in the plates of the maturin's belly he saw: 

_Beverly leaps from a yacht into the open ocean as Ben stands laughing on the deck. For a moment she is as if suspended: a woman, a girl, half in flight, her red hair streaming in the sunlight. A jolly looking dog follows her into the water. Ben rolls up his sleeves and kicks off his shoes and with a running start he too takes flight._

_In Chicago the sun has set and Eddie is gesticulating violently over sushi, arguing something until Richie, beaming, leans over and kisses Eddie on the mouth, a fleeting kiss to distract Eddie from Richie plucking the roll off his plate. Eddie's lips form the word _asshole_ but he leans in in his turn to kiss Richie, whose mouth is full, his cheeks puffed out. _

_There is Audra, someone he loved but briefly, Audra turning sharply on a stage with her hair in a victorious 1850s up-do as a breathless audience watches her bring life to someone's hard-won words._

_And here in Milan, Mike is consulting a tourist's map. He wears a leather saddlebag. The title cover of one Bill's books peeks out from it. He is handsome, one hand on the handle of a silver-painted bike, and the corner of his mouth is turning upwards almost dreamily, as if he can feel Bill's regard._

Again said the maturin: do not be afraid. 

Bill beheld the turtle. The waters ate his tears. He said, "Why didn't you help us?"

The maturin said I cannot take your life. All of it is for you. The good of it. The pain. I can only love you through it.

He could have wept at the injustice of it if he could have understood it as such. Only here in the dark, in this great serenity beyond fear and death and pain and laughter and the simple joy of someone's hand holding his own, he thought he did understand and what he understood was that the turtle couldn't take those things from him, the fear, the laughter, the small petty wondrous loves, because they weren't the turtle's to take. They were Bill's to have. They were his.

Bill breathed in. The water filled him. He was skin, a vessel, a minuscule thing before the maturin. He wasn't afraid. The current bore him on. He faded with it. The turtle made long sweeps through this ocean, and wherever it exhaled, silver bubbles burst into newborn stars; and the turtle, oh. The turtle loved them. The turtle always had. That was the way of it.

  
  


**somewhere further still.**

Here is summer! Here is summer in Derry, the Derry that should have been: the Derry that rose sweetly out of the earth like a flowering vine, a vine that bore fruit rather than strangled. It's summer again and Bill coasts down the highest hill on Silver, hollering as he goes, the pedals twisting madly in the air as he holds his feet out wide like they're wings. He catches the pedals near the bottom and tilts his weight, and look at him go, folks, Wild Bill Denbrough knocks that turn right out, still coasting along the drag on that momentum. He turns his face up to the hot, hot sun and laughs mad as a hatter. 

Well, now, and who's this coming up tight in second? Why, it's none other than our very own Stanley Uris, king of the Dewey decimal system, the guy to whom all the birds like to shake their feathers, _if you know what I mean_ ; we all know him, we all love him. Stan sidles up next to Wild Bill and says, "Hey, Bill, what's kicks?" He's beautiful in the sunlight, our Stan is, his hair a fountain of fair curls. Stan pricked his finger on a spinning wheel and fell into an everlasting sleep but now here he is and here's Bill too, and boy oh boy are these two fellas happy to see each other.

"Nothing yet," says Bill. "I can't remember where the ice cream parlor's at."

"Follow me," says Stan, "I can show you. Have you seen Georgie yet?"

"Not yet," says Bill, and he smiles so hugely that everyone who sees him might just fall in love with him. Stan did a long time ago. So did a lot of other kids. Bill, though, God love him, he never knew; he never thought to expect it. "D'you think he's around?"

"Bill," Stan says seriously, "Georgie might as well be super glued to your ass," and Bill laughs for what feels like the first time in about a hundred years. 

"Jesus, Stan, you sound like Richie."

Stan makes a face and says, "Please don't insult me like that. Thank you."

"Sure thing," says Bill agreeably. "You're the man, Stan."

"Now you sound like Richie."

Bill laughs again. So does Stan. And there, at the end of the street, standing just outside the ice cream parlor, can you guess who it is? It's Georgie Denbrough, jumping up and down, shouting over and over again, "Bill! Hey, Bill! Over here!"

"Race ya," says Bill to Stan, and Stan says, "Why bother?"

Off goes Bill, _heigh ho Silver!_ and Stan takes his time following down that quiet street in Derry, Maine, as the summer bugs sing their little songs and a man goes up on a ladder to fix the letters on the marquee outside the two screen theatre.


End file.
